R-in­fra in­fuses Rs 520 crore in Delhi’s BSES busi­ness

Reliance In­fra­struc­ture Limited has in­fused Rs 520 crore eq­uity into BSES Delhi dis­tri­bu­tion com­pa­nies as part of Rs 5,100 crore fi­nan­cial pack­age be­ing worked by IDBI bank. The pack­age re­quired the pro­mot­ers to bring in 20 per cent eq­uity or Rs 1,020 crore. It is to be noted that Delhi gov­ern­ment will in­fuse an­other Rs 500 crore into the dis­tri­bu­tion com­pa­nies. Dis­cus­sions with IDBI bank are at an ad­vanced stage and are ex­pected to con­clude soon. Com­ple­tion of this process will help ar­range long-term debt to fi­nance the cash-flow mis­match and en­able BSES Delhi to fa­cil­i­tate its pay­ments to gen­er­a­tion and trans­mis­sion com­pa­nies, it said. Ac­cord­ing to Reliance In­fra­struc­ture CEO, Mr. Lalit Jalan, ef­forts were be­ing made to en­sure quick pay­ments to gen­er­a­tion and trans­mis­sion com­pa­nies. “Over last 9 years, the power pur­chase cost for Delhi dis­coms has in­creased by 280 per cent whereas dur­ing the same time, the con­sumer tar­iff has only in­creased by 36 per cent. Due to this huge dis­crep­ancy be­tween cost in­creases and rev­enue, there is a cur­rent rev­enue deficit of nearly Rs 2 per unit, re­sult­ing in un­der-re­cov­er­ies of Rs 20 crores per day for the three Delhi dis­coms,” Mr. Jalan re­port­edly said.